


the familiar passage of my outstretched hand

by 40millionyears



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Dialogue Heavy, Ethics, F/M, Gen, Philosophy, Season/Series 03, Soulmates, never met a comma I didn't like, the reason is friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-28 04:40:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16716755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/40millionyears/pseuds/40millionyears
Summary: he'll never actually have to run someone over with a trolley or kill them to donate their organs, and he finds he liked complex moral quandaries a lot more when they were hypothetical.or, what if chidi was the one to find about about his & eleanor's relationship in the previous reboots instead?





	the familiar passage of my outstretched hand

**Author's Note:**

> alt-canon after 3x05. inspired by [this post](http://soullistrations.tumblr.com/post/180362005586) by [soullistrations](http://soullistrations.tumblr.com/) and my own ongoing frustration with the way the reboots have been dealt with in the show. 
> 
> title from the cat empire's "motion".

Here's the thing. Chidi never set out to hurt anyone, ever. He just wanted to do what was right, and the more he read about exactly the best way to do that, the more the goalposts for 'right' seemed to keep shifting.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
Four and a half hours into the flight to Budapest, not long after Chidi has kicked Jason out of the neighboring seat for trying to throw peanuts into the open mouth of the man sleeping across the aisle ("you get extra points if it goes up his nose!" he'd whispered excitedly, ignoring Chidi's pleas for him to work on the coloring book the attendants had given him instead), Michael sinks down into it.  
  
"I found Jason in the galley," he explains, "trying to get the flight attendants to give him enough spare life vests to make something he called a, uh, "super mega bouncy castle". He said you made him plane-homeless. I gave him my seat."  
  
"Oh, Michael, I'm sorry. I thought there was a couple of spares a few rows back, I told him to go there."  
  
"No, there was," Michael confirms. "Eleanor has claimed all three of them."  
  
Chidi scrabbles for his glasses, which he had tucked safely into the seat pocket after Jason had tried to wear them in the hopes of turning the movie on his tiny entertainment screen into 3-D, and sighs. "I'm sorry," he repeats. "I'll go and get him."  
  
"No, it's alright. If you don't mind me sitting with you. Janet actually enjoys his… interesting perspective on life."  
  
"No, please," Chidi offers, gesturing as though Michael hasn't already settled comfortably back into the seat. Chidi marvels at how his suit has stayed so crisp despite their fast-paced cross-continental travel. Not a single crease. Maybe it was an immortal thing.  
  
Michael attempts to fit the plane-issued headphones over his ears in something resembling comfort, before giving up and tossing them into the foot-well in disgust. “How did it go with Simone?” he asks. “Eleanor told me it was rough on you. Well, she used some other words, but I don’t want to pile on.”  
  
“Oh, you know, I broke up with her to stop myself from inadvertently sending her to hell. But it’s fine, because even though she was the only girlfriend I’d ever had who made me feel like it was okay that my brain is the way it is, I still couldn’t even tell her that I loved her because I was never _sure._ I thought I did but I was never certain. And I’ve never been even that close before and I probably never will be again, because I can’t risk anyone else finding out about the afterlife. So I will be alone. Forever. Until I die, again, and go back to the Bad Place. Again.” He shrugs with a forced, uncanny nonchalance, staring straight ahead. “I’m doing greaaaaat."  
  
Michael doesn’t respond, and when Chidi glances over at him, his face is seized in mild panic, throat bobbing with forced swallows.  
  
“Crap,” Michael says, eventually, smoothing non-existent rumples from his jacket and straightening a tie that isn’t crooked. “Okay. Okay, I shouldn’t tell you this. But you are clearly miserable, and even though that used to be something I sincerely enjoyed, it makes me feel bad now. All… swirly inside. God, you humans feel things way too easily. It’s a design flaw. You don’t need this many emotions!”  
  
“That’s called empathy,” Chidi says. “You shouldn’t tell me what?”  
  
“Okay. Uh. Well. You have… been that close, before. In one of the reboots, you and Eleanor fell in love. Deeply.” He shifts uneasily in his seat. “And she told you that she loved you, and… and you told her that you loved her back.”  
  
It sounds like a set-up, so Chidi waits for the punchline. But the seconds unfold and Michael’s just peering at him expectantly. Uncertainly.  
  
“Whhhhaaaaaaat?”  
  
Michael claps him on the leg. “So, see, you are capable of telling someone you love them. Okay, good talk. Try to get some sleep before Budapest!”  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
It gnaws away at him through the exhibit, through Jason’s extended discourse on boob-art and the lingering smell of frying eggs and he wonders if he’ll die here in a Hungarian jail with the weight of this knowledge still hanging around his neck. Even his encounter with Kamilah – which makes him feel so delightfully light and unearthly for a fleeting and wonderful moment, like a giant soufflé is hugging all of his thoughts – can’t completely shake it.  
  
They were in love.  
  
They were in love and they were lovers and somewhere in eight hundred afterlifetimes of being tortured in hell alongside her, he had felt sure enough of it to tell her so. He had once made a sales assistant cry because it took him five weeks and twenty-seven in-store consultations to choose a cell phone plan, but he had declared his love for Eleanor as easily as stating his name.  
  
He needs to see it for himself.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  


On the flight to Arizona, three hours down and faced with another eight, he can no longer stand it. He slides out of his pod and finds Janet on the other side of the half-empty cabin.  
  
“Hey Janet?” he whispers, trying not to disturb the sleeping passengers around them. She’s sitting perfectly upright with her eyes shut, hands folded neatly in her lap and a garish zebra-striped inflatable travel pillow around her neck. She and Michael had both been endlessly fascinated by the array of accessories available at every airport, latching with glee onto items that were both unfamiliar and utterly useless.  
  
( _“Look at these!” Michael had crowed with delight in Jacksonville, brandishing a thick pair of swamp-colored compression socks decorated with tiny dancing alligators. “Because your veins are so weak and susceptible to exploding!”)_  
  
Her eyes snap open. “Hi Chidi.”  
  
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”  
  
“Oh, no, I don’t sleep,” she waves away the idea as though it was absurd, and he supposes that for her it was. “Occasionally I do need to go into power-saver mode, but that shouldn’t be necessary for another four thousand Earth years or so. I was just closing my eyes because everyone else was. What’s up?”  
  
“Okay. Um. You know what happened when we were in the Bad Place, right?”  
  
“I know everything,” she says, matter-of-factly. “That’s what I am.”  
  
“Right. Is there a way you can… show me one of the attempts? Michael told me some things. About me. And Eleanor. About me and Eleanor. And I can’t stop thinking about it and it’s driving me crazy.”  
  
“Well, I saved a complete record of all of the reboots before Michael shut the neighbourhood down. And you can access them. But flooding your brain with memories from the afterlife is dangerous, Chidi. It can have all sorts of effects. It can scramble your organs so they’re in the wrong place, or make your face melt like a Dali painting.”  
  
“I need to know,” he presses. His breath is skittery, edging on desperate, and all of his fears are most definitely his again. “Please, Janet. They’re my memories. I… I need them back.”  
  
She nods, and he slides into the empty seat beside her. Like the one he just vacated, the plush fabric immediately seems to mould itself around him for utmost comfort. Since he’s going to hell anyway, he crosses his fingers that Tahani will fly them first class everywhere from now on. Janet rummages around in the (novelty, airplane-shaped) cabin bag she’d bought, pulling out the virtual reality simulator with a satisfied grunt. Chidi takes the earpieces from her outstretched hand, inhaling slowly.  
  
“We need to start with a basic three-second memory,” she informs him. He knows she’s concerned, but he also knows that she won’t stop him. Ordinarily the knowledge that he’s exploiting that would send him spiralling, but he’s already got enough on his mind. “So that you get used to the sensation. Put those in.”  
  
_A smooth saxophone, and then an idyllic looking town square, flowers in full bloom. He’s eating frozen yoghurt._ Everyone’s _eating frozen yoghurt. An upbeat man named Gunnar is trying to convince him to sign up for the Northside Classic Kickball League.  
  
_Janet stops the recording, and Chidi takes a quick roll-call of his internal organs. His stomach hurts, which is nothing new, but everything else feels like it’s in the right place. His face is tingling, though, and when he goes to touch it his arms hang limp and unmoving at his side. Janet pats his forearm soothingly, switching the device to front-camera mode so that he can see what she does. His skin is drooping off of his cheeks and jaw, and one of his eyebrows has slid down his temple. She helpfully shrouds him with a blanket in case anyone should notice.  
  
When his features have re-arranged themselves correctly and he regains feeling in his upper extremities, they resume. “Okay. Now, that should have rewired your brain a bit so that you can cope with more. But there is still a very small chance your head will implode,” she says cheerily, tapping at the screen a few times. “Very small,” she reiterates, seeing his distressed expression, and he puts the earphones back in, trying to quell his churning insides.  
  
“Okay, this is Attempt 119. Ready?” she asks.  
  
He’s not, but the jazz music starts again anyway.  
  
_Watching himself fall in love with Eleanor isn’t the punch in the gut he was expecting. It’s more like muscle memory. Like he doesn’t even remember how he learned it, but he’s pretty sure he could do it again perfectly without thinking if he had to. He teaches her why she should stop accusing Descartes of ‘just wanting to keep his options open’, and she convinces him that Heidegger was_ begging _to be made fun of. She bandages his owl-talon wounds and he gives up flying to help her find her creepy lizard. He gets addicted to popcorn shrimp and she volunteers to do the dishes occasionally.  
  
__They’d thought they were in heaven, and he can see why.  
  
__And then they’re lying in bed at Mindy St Clair’s. There are approximately thirteen different floral patterns in the room, all clashing, but he strongly doubts that was something he’d noticed at the time. His fingers are dancing lightly over the curve of her hip, her hand on his chest. He almost hates himself for how smugly content he looks, except that Eleanor looks equally smug and_ he did that, _so.  
  
__“I love you,” she says, raising her hand to his lips as if he was ever going to protest. “And you don’t need to respond, cause I know you have trouble saying how you feel_ —"  
  
_“I love you too,” he interrupts, effortless and assured.  
  
__She buries her head into the crook of his neck, hiding her grin. Watching himself pull her a little closer, his arm wrapping more securely around her waist, he thinks about the dog he had refused to name, the schoolyard soccer team he had refused to select, the thesis he had refused to give a final title, and tries not to think about how easy it had apparently once been to label his feelings for her.  
  
_He tears the plugs out from his ears, passes them back to Janet with shaky hands.  
  
“Okay. Okay. I need to go and… have a very quiet and prolonged crisis about this. Over there. Probably forever.”  
  
“Okay!” Janet says agreeably. “Or, you could just talk to me about it. If you wanted. I know I’m not, well, a person. But I do contain all the knowledge in the universe, and I’ve been practicing my listening face. Look!” She arranges her features into a sympathetic expression, and points to herself. “See? Also, it might help to actually talk it through rather than internalise all of your worries.”  
  
He’s touched. “Thank you, Janet. Really. But I don’t want to bother you.”  
  
“We have another seven hours and thirteen minutes, and I already know how all the movies that are showing end,” she says, unconcerned, patting the edge of the seat. He hesitates, his hand fluttering across the headrest. She gazes up at him patiently. “Chidi. I know you don’t remember, but I spent eight hundred reboots helping you guys. I like doing it. It’s what I’m good at. And, you all mean a lot to me… I’d like it if I could be of use down here, too.”  
  
He huffs out a breath in acquiescence and slides back into the seat. “Janet, did you just emotionally manipulate me a little bit?”  
  
“I did!” she exclaims quietly, with a pleased nod. “It’s such a human trait, but I’m really getting the hang of it. Thank you for noticing.”  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
He stress-eats seven packets of peanuts while he tries to organize his thoughts, shredding the plastic into tiny, mangled ribbons that scatter on his tray-table like sad confetti.   
  
“The thing is," since _The Sound of Music_ had taught him that the best place to start was the beginning, "I didn’t even want to break up with Simone. We were happy. Were we happy? I think we were happy. But I did, and now we’re here and I’m finding out that I was in love with Eleanor in another life, and I don't know if I can even think about what that means because it’s too much. It’s too much and it’s too fast and it's giving me a stomach ache.”  
  
Janet pushes her glasses up her nose. He doesn’t know where they came from and he can’t recall her actually putting them on, but they do make him feel strangely comforted. “Okay. We don’t have to talk about that yet. How does the general idea of telling Eleanor that you know something about your shared time in the afterlife that she doesn’t make you feel?”  
  
“Vexed.” That, he's sure about.   
  
“How about not telling her?”  
  
“Also vexed.”  
  
“Well that’s not a great start,” she says, poker-faced. Whether through all the time spent with Eleanor and Simone, or just by virtue of her ever-advancing capabilities, Janet had acquired a biting sense of sass that he finds alternately amusing and troubling.  
  
(She’d also developed a remarkably strong opinion on thread count, especially for someone who doesn’t need sheets, but they can chalk that one firmly up to Tahani’s influence.)  
  
“I can’t lie to her,” he says. "I know that much."  
  
“You lied to Simone,” Janet points out.  
  
“That was different,” he protests. “I was literally trying to save her soul. It was the right thing to do. I had to.” He thinks what he means is, _it was the thing I ended up doing because it was ostensibly the least shitty out of a bunch of shitty options and I ran out of time but ethics isn’t always about what might seem the least shitty on the surface and sure there’s an argument to be made for utilitarianism but she seemed okay with ending it and that makes it worse not that I want her to be hurt but she seemed okay with it and I don't know if I am,_ but. ‘Right’ is close enough.  
  
“Yes, but you still lied. And according to the 2000 years of philosophical writings that I just read while you were talking and also everything I know about your life, which is everything about your life, lying contradicts your primary moral code.”  
  
“So, what, now I’m a bad person for lying to Simone? I mean, I’m going to Hell anyway, what does it matter?”  
  
“No, Chidi,” Janet says gently. She shifts in her seat to face him more fully, her eyes bright and kind. “You’re not a bad person. You made the _choice_ to lie to Simone, not because lying is inherently good, but because it was the best option based on the circumstances. Which means that, if it’s the best option in these circumstances, you can make the choice to lie to Eleanor too.”  
  
That’s the problem. He’s never been a fan of options.  
  
_(A sunny afternoon. Eleanor, in his office in Sydney, slurping a gigantic smoothie and trying to pick a fight with him about perfect duties. Just a regular Tuesday. “Okay, but it’s impossible to actually put in place. Also, it’s kind of conceited to assume that the rules you suggest are the right ones. Like, we’ve all gotten wasted and crowned ourselves the king of something, he ain’t special. He totally just wanted a law named after him.”  
  
__Chidi tries to hide his smile. “You don’t think it makes sense for there to be a set of social duties or norms for what’s good that everyone should follow?”  
  
__“It kinda makes sense, as a theory, but the world doesn’t always work like that, nerd.” She catches his expression and gives him a jovial smirk in return, propping her feet up on the desk and waving her smoothie at him for emphasis. “It’s not black and white. It’s like, okay, when I was in college, I worked this shitty job with a super-perv of a manager. One day he left his computer on, so obviously I went through his emails, and let’s just say he was doing some stuff that even I wasn’t cool with. Now the “rules” say would say that it was wrong to look at his email at all. Buuuuuut because I did, the next time the cops searched the place I ratted him out, because he was wearing a shirt I hated, he got arrested, and the barely-legal ladies of greater Tempe could rest easy. So maybe I broke a rule, but that little bad thing meant that a much bigger better thing happened. Bonus, one of the cops was super-hot, and I made out with him a little bit afterwards._ Two _better things!”  
  
__There is… a lot to unpack, there, all of it varying levels of disturbing, so he latches onto one of the smaller details. "_ _Did you say ‘_ the next time’ _the police searched?”  
  
__“Oh, yeah, we got raided every now and then, because the building was also sometimes a brothel. And a porn set after 6.30._ _You know how it can be.”  
  
__Chidi did not, in fact, know how that particular situation could be.)  
  
  
  
_.  
  
  
  
He goes to the bathroom, needing a moment’s distance, and wanders a long lap of the cabins. He’d always enjoyed flying before. The way you were seemingly handed a block of time all at once, malleable and un-constricted. He understands time differently now, though, and the boundless hours in the sky feel like a sentence.  
  
“If you’re up for it, I think there’s something else you should see,” Janet says when he returns, and hands him the earphones again. There’s another pleasant jazz break, and then he sees himself sitting on the couch in Eleanor’s Bad Place house as she paces back and forth in front of him, tense and nervy.  
  
_“I’ve been keeping a secret from you. About you.”  
  
__“What is it?”  
  
__“The thing is, it’s not even harming you! And if I tell you, I feel like it might harm you. So, uh, ethically speaking, I don’t think I have to tell you.”  
  
__“Yeah, well, forget all that. This is freaking me out. I’m losing my mind. So, just tell me.”  
  
__The only thing more uncomfortable than watching himself in bed, is watching himself watch himself in bed. It’s the square root of second hand embarrassment. Eleanor shows him a tape of the two of them at Mindy's, confessing their love. He listens to himself wonder out loud how he had said it so easily the same thing he’s still wondering now, and she questions the same thing of herself. Maybe he hadn’t known her well enough, then, to catch the hurt in her eyes as he told her he didn’t have those kinds of feelings now, or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to look closely enough.  
  
_He yanks out the earplugs. “There was a _tape?_ ” he hisses. “Why was there a _tape_?”  
  
“Yes. Mindy St Clair maintained that if the two of you were going to use her house as a sex den, she was allowed to record it,” Janet recalls, her face disconcertingly straight.  
  
“Well that’s… horrifying.”  
  
“In the final reboot, you and Eleanor escaped to Mindy’s, again, and Mindy showed her the tape. She kept it from you for a while, for a lot of the same reasons that are bothering you, but in the end… well, you just saw.”  
  
He had seen. He had seen Eleanor do everything that he was afraid of, and he’s surprised to find that he thinks it both brave and cowardly. Had he been better off knowing, in that situation? Had she been better off for telling him? Whose feelings should take precedence, if the outcomes are at odds? He poses this question to Janet.  
  
“Do you think it would hurt her to tell her the truth?” Janet asks.  
  
“I think… I _think_ I think that maybe it would be unfair. That it might manipulate the situation, force her to think she has feelings for me that she doesn’t, now. I don’t want to push her into anything. _Buuuuut_ maybe she has a right to know either way? It’s her past, too. Am I being unethical by keeping information from her?”  
  
And maybe that’s the crux of it all. Leaving aside whatever the implications are for him, for their relationship… he knows something, something concrete that could help begin to patch all the pieces of them that have been erased. Doesn’t she deserve to know it too? Shouldn’t she get to have every inch of herself that she can? But if he does tell her, his only motivation can be that she has the right to know, and he doesn’t know if he can honestly say that it would be.  
  
“If you did tell her, would you want her to know what happened because you truly think that knowledge will benefit her? Or do you want her to know because maybe you want it to happen again, now?”  
  
He blinks. Janet's omniscient powers weren’t even supposed to work properly here, they couldn’t actually extend to reading his mind. Could they? _No, right? No. Probably not_. Maybe he’s just that transparent. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I want her to feel. I don’t even know how I want _me_ to feel. I don’t know anything except that I know too much.”  
  
He thinks he might know, though. If he had to be honest. Since the day that she had shoved her way into his office, and his life (well, this life), he had felt something for her. It wasn’t love, not then. He had been on the verge of something with Simone, and then _with_ Simone, and she had been a quasi-student who kept trying to submit crude cartoons of Aristotle and Plato in compromising positions as homework.  
  
( _“Oh, come on!” she’d exclaimed, when he’d suggested that, in fact, not all of the ancient Greek philosophers were just writing about sex. “This is_ definitely _the kind of pleasure and happy living he was talking about.”  
  
__She actually wasn’t that bad of an artist._ )  
  
But they’d spent a year working together, a long and often exhausting and more often exhilarating year, and he can’t say he hadn’t been affected by her. Eleanor was fearless and funny and occasionally terrifying for someone so small. She was brash, and weird, and her absurd questions often made him consider possibilities and points of view he’d never otherwise have entertained. It wasn’t love, but it was a tiny spark. Something more complex than simple friendship that he didn’t have a name for. He had frequently felt just a tiny bit too big for his own skin when she was around, chalking it up to a vague anxiety about the future of their project, but now that he knows the truth he wonders if maybe it was because there was always a little bit of her under there as well. Like he’d made room for her in his bones.  
  
Chidi doesn’t believe in fate, he’s never been accused of being a romantic, but he has to believe that three hundred years spent alongside Eleanor in the afterlife couldn’t have been completely erased from his being. It was an irrevocable part of him, whether he was aware of it or not.  
  
It wasn’t love. But it had been.  
  
So he thinks he might know, a little bit, and he tells Janet all of this as well. “But, then, what if I’m just reacting to the fact that I can never be with anyone else, because I might accidentally doom them to an eternity in the Bad Place?” he counters, because he’s never come to a realization without it giving rise to a hundred new qualms. “What if I’m confusing the idea that I _can_ be with Eleanor with the idea that I might  _want_ to be with her?”  
  
“You could be with Tahani, theoretically, using that logic,” Janet points out, tapping a finger against her chin meditatively. “Does that also make you consider that you might be in love with _her_?”  
  
Chidi sticks his head out into the aisle and spots Tahani, sound asleep and still elegant a few rows in front. She was, of course, an impeccable traveller; she had produced a cashmere blanket somewhere from within her bag like a magician when they’d boarded, and was currently wearing an eye mask that he was pretty sure cost more than his monthly salary and might have been made of actual diamonds. He really did like Tahani a lot. She was warm and intelligent, and astoundingly generous at the heart of it all. Clearly beautiful, as Eleanor insistently pointed out. But even though he’s known her for just as long, even though they've been through almost as much together, he doesn’t feel the remains of that past etched into him the way he thinks he does with Eleanor.  
  
“…no,” he admits, the certainty of the word sticking in his throat. “No, I don’t think so. And not just because Tahani is married, however platonically, and it would therefore also be a whole different moral… no-no. I don’t feel… like I could feel that way about her.”  
  
"Okay then," Janet says, "we're getting somewhere," and he could swear she's swallowing a triumphant smile. She knows so much more about them than he ever will.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
“Here’s the thing about me,” Chidi says, shifting his legs to let Janet back into her seat. She had gone to the bathroom because she thought the cabin crew would be suspicious if she didn't. (She's been so kind to him that Chidi doesn't have the heart to tell her how much they don't care). “Here's the thing. I have spent my entire life worrying about how to make the right decision. Considering every ethical angle, who might be affected and how much and what if I'm contributing to global warming or imperialism or the death of the coral reefs? Every single day, my brain was just grinding away. But in one of those reboots, in that reboot, I wasn’t… _consumed_ like this. I just said things. Declaratively. And I meant them, and that was it. And I don’t know how much of that was due to Eleanor, but what if it all was? What if our relationship was the thing that made me better? What if I can be better, again, now? But then am I being selfish? Would I only want a relationship with her because of how it might benefit me?”  
  
“Chidi,” Janet says, and her tone is ever patient and obliging but it’s also thinly threaded with steel now. “It’s not selfish to want to be with someone who makes you better. According to more than seventeen thousand books and peer-reviewed journal articles I have downloaded on the subject, that’s what a relationship should do.”  
  
It hits him, just then, that there’s no going back. That he’ll never un-know, now, what it was like to be with her, and that knowledge will color everything from here on out. With that, he can finally put words to a half-formed fear that’s been hovering just out of reach ever since Michael’s confession. “But in eight hundred times, it only happened once. We only fell in love once. Who’s to say it would even work again now? What if I tell her and we decide to try and we both just end up worse off? That would be… that would be the worst possible use of this information.”  
  
Janet tilts her head, considering him while chewing on her lip hesitantly in the most startlingly human expression he’s seen yet, before apparently coming to a silent decision. She passes him the earphones once more with a reassuring nod and starts the simulator. Rather than a single memory this time, he’s hit with an avalanche of tiny moments; little pieces of a full picture that he can't see yet.   
  
_Eleanor, gripping his hand supportively at a town meeting. “Hey. I love you, man.”  
  
__Eleanor, standing anxious in front of him. “I never want to leave you! I want to stay in the Good Place because of you. Because I love you.”  
  
__Eleanor, about to be taken (she thinks) to the Bad Place. “You were my flashlight.”  
  
__Eleanor, just before they’re rebooted for the first time, scrawling the first thing she can think of that will help her in the next attempt. ‘Find Chidi.’  
  
__Eleanor, always.  
  
__(Maybe it’s muscle memory for her as well.)  
  
__Then the four of them, plus Janet. They’re in a large room that he doesn’t recognise from any of the previous memories, furnished by someone with a heavy hand for 80s burnished gold, twin cylinder portals slammed shut at the far end. Even as an onlooker, he can sense a nervy frisson in the air.  
  
__They look like they’re waiting for something.  
  
__He must have just interrupted Jason and Janet talking about something, because he watches Janet tell him “you’re not really a part of this, Chidi.” He doesn’t know what he is or isn’t a part of, though, because he’s already moving by the time they start speaking again, the resolute set of his face a strange mask to view from the outside. He wishes he could feel the fire that he’s sure is igniting his bones. It must have been incredible.  
  
__He watches himself stride up to Eleanor, standing aimlessly in the centre of the room, and take her face in his hands. Watches himself kiss her thoroughly, muffling her small squeak of surprise. He’s overcome with a sudden yearning to tell himself to knot his fingers in her hair, to hold her tighter until her body leaves a dent in his own, because this him doesn’t know that he’s about to forget her again. Watches her beam up at him as they break away, bright as the goddamn sun. Why hadn’t he immediately kissed her again? Why hadn’t he done whatever he could to make her look at him like that forever?  
  
__Five minutes later he’s back on the sidewalk with the sizzling wreck of an air-conditioner for company instead, and if there’s a ghost of her still clinging to the edges of the space between his hands, he doesn’t know it.  
  
_“It wasn’t just once,” Janet tells him softly, when he unplugs, his chest painfully tight, as though there’s any chance he might have misunderstood what he’d just seen. “It was lots of different ways, and none of them was ever going to end well. But this isn't Michael's neighborhood anymore. There’s no reset on this one, Chidi.”  
  
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he says.   
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
After a flight attendant brings Janet a cup of tea, which she asks for because the man behind her had done so and then makes Chidi drink surreptitiously so as not to seem impolite, he turns to face her again. There's something about what he's just seen in the reboots that's bothering him. Well, there's a lot of things bothering him, always, not least the fact that he apparently died and went to hell for three hundred years, but there's one specific and prevalent worry.  
  
"How much of it was… real? If Michael was pulling the strings the whole time, every time, how much of any of it was actually us?" He knows, logically, that everything he's just seen was a series of moves in a bizarre hell version of chess, but the fit of her head into the space under his couldn't have been a total lie.  
  
She gives him an apologetic smile. "That's not really something that's quantifiable. But if Michael had had total control, he would never have had to try eight hundred times to make his plan work."  
  
"Yeah," he says, barely audible and laced with a complacency he doesn't feel. His head is too full of what-ifs, pounding and insistent and unanswerable, and a sharp tug keeps twisting his stomach. He'll never actually have to run someone over with a trolley or kill them to donate their organs and he finds he liked complex moral quandaries a lot more when they were hypothetical. "Okay. Yeah. I think maybe that's enough for now."  
  
Janet hands him her blanket.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
The hours keep stretching on and he's restless and fidgety, flicking through every available channel on the in-flight entertainment so many times that he eventually breaks the handset. Janet turns back to him, tearing her gaze from the just-blossoming sunrise outside the plane window. He assumes she's going to tell him to try to sleep again, or to stop bouncing his leg, or maybe she's just run every possible scenario through her system and will now inform him exactly what the hell he should do.  
  
Whatever he thinks she's going to say, it's not "I was married to Jason."  
  
"I'm sorry, you were _what_?" He'd assume he just misheard, except that Janet has perfect enunciation.  
  
She nods. "In the very first attempt. I got married to Jason and then somehow I was still in love with him in the eight hundred and second. Every time Michael rebooted me those feelings should have gone away, but they didn't. I couldn't remember them, but they were always there."  
  
"How is that even possible?" Chidi questions, racking his brain for everything he's been told about Janet and Janets. It isn't much - he remains mildly puzzled by what Janet actually is, or isn't - but he's almost certain that falling in love wasn't included in the programming.  
  
"Janets weren't designed to function at this level. Michael rebooted me far more times than the Janet-makers ever expected. Whatever I am now is significantly beyond what I should have been. I've gone rogue," she says, with a proud smile that flashes across her face and disappears just as quickly. "But it's not easy. Being here now, knowing all the ways things were different. I mean, I'm supposed to know, but I'm not supposed to have feelings about it. That's why Michael didn't want to show you guys any of the reboots. Human minds are very unequipped to deal with that kind of knowledge."  
  
"No offense," she quickly adds, seeing his stunned expression. "Yours is very capable. Definitely at the upper limits of a human brain."  
  
"None taken," he reassures her. "I think the last four hours, and also my general existence, kind of prove your point."  
  
"Please don't say anything to Jason. It's different than with you and Eleanor. The stakes are different. It wouldn't be the best option. I just… wanted you to know that I do actually sort of understand what you're going through."  
  
"Are you still in love with him now?"  
  
Janet is quiet for so long that Chidi starts to panic that he'd accidentally activated her power-save mode somehow. Maybe he wasn't supposed to ask that. Maybe Janets shut down if they got sad. Maybe she wasn't supposed to tell him everything that she had and she'd malfunctioned and it's not like he can just take her to a local mechanic for a tune-up. What had he done? His own current dilemma was enough of a murky ethical soup, he couldn't add possibly killing Janet to it.  
  
He really doesn't want to have made her sad.  
  
"Sometimes I wonder if it would be better if I could just be a normal Janet again," she finally replies, and he can read between the lines. Chidi scoots slightly closer to her, so that their shoulders are touching, and they sit and wait as the sky brightens above the clouds and Phoenix looms closer.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
Eleanor smiles at him as they're loading their bags into the SUV, had given him a quick side hug in the arrivals hall. It's just a friendly greeting, a wry apology for Arizona, but he's something of an archivist of her various smiles and touches now, rapidly gifted their repository, and he's so exhausted and overwhelmed that he nearly confesses everything right there, in a dingy parking garage.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
It takes them three and a half hours to fly from Phoenix to Calgary, and another two to drive from the airport to the buttfuck-nowhere town where Doug Forcett lives, and he spends every one of them staring blankly out the window.  
_  
Tell her, don't tell her. Tell her, don't tell her_. An infinite game of heads or tails, except the coin has seventeen sides and the symbols are indecipherable. If he does tell her, would it be a good tactic to ask her about her feelings first, make sure she's even reading the same book if not necessarily on the same page, and then bring up the reboots later? Or is that somehow more manipulative, like he's using his knowledge as a reward for the right answer? No, it would definitely be better to start with what he knows about the reboots. It would probably be better. It might be better. In certain circumstances it could be argued that 'better' would be a reasonable word to use. And if he doesn't tell her, is it a secret or a lie?  
  
(What were the ethics involved in lying to yourself?)  
  
It would be so easy to fall in love with her, here, now, in this strand of the multiverse. He knows exactly how to, and Chidi has always done better with a blueprint.  
  
_There's no reset on this one._  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
Later, as an incredibly jacked demon drags him backwards towards the portal, Chidi watches Eleanor dive over the bar and grab at his foot to try to pull him back. He sees the relief on her face after Tahani cracks the guy neatly across the head with a pool cue, saving them both. He feels the first few fragile knots in his chest start to untie as they scramble away from the door together.  
  
This isn't his first near-death rodeo. He knows what it feels like to have to confront all of your life decisions in the face of that life ending. He knows that no matter how many scenarios he can find to agonize over in any given situation, there's usually a tiny flicker, a first impulse that's worth heeding. He knows that the longer he dwells, the more time he's giving himself to find reasons not to make any decision at all.  
  
He spots Jason hurling the 5-ball at a demon trying to strangle Janet, knocking her away. Janet whirls around and beams at him in thanks, and Chidi wonders how on earth he can't know. Jason might not be the brightest guy in the room (any room, ever), but he's proven himself to be pretty aware of other people's feelings, and Janet's affection is something almost tangible, hanging heavy in the air. Chidi would wonder how on earth _he_ hadn't seen it, but then, no one had ever suggested the same of him.  
  
"Is it just me or is Janet a straight-up hottie right now?" Eleanor whispers to him as they hide behind the bar, trying to avoid getting hit by flying billiards accessories and stray shards of broken furniture. On the other side of the pool table, Jason has moved onto working on another Molotov cocktail, and Chidi can only hope they're outside of his wildly unpredictable firing line.  
  
"How are you this close to being dragged to hell and _still horny_?" he sputters.  
  
She shrugs, half disbelief and half acceptance, but her mouth quirks up into a grin at her own audacity. She's incorrigible. She's alive, and here, and next to him. Under his skin where she's always been. He'll never un-know what it was like to be with her, and maybe he was never meant to.  
  
And just like that, enveloped in an unexpected soufflé-embrace sense of peace, he makes his choice.  
  
"Eleanor? I have to tell you something."

**Author's Note:**

> turns out I'm still not over my obsession with the casual way these idiots deal, or don't deal, with the knowledge of the reboots. chidi's (lack of) reaction especially has really bothered me. this is a guy who couldn't decide which chair to sit on in simone's office, who ended up in the bad place because of his terminal inability to cope with choices, but he's just totally cool with having 300+ years of his memory wiped? yeah, no. I love this show, but I will forever maintain that that's not character growth, that's a missed opportunity.
> 
> (housekeeping: for narrative purposes let's assume that eleanor, chidi, and janet flew to jacksonville to meet the others before they all went to budapest together. first class probably doesn't have double seats, but I needed them to be able to sit together, so eh. also janet apparently can't remember the previous reboots, based on season two, but since michael says they kept a complete copy of everything that happened and they wrote that manifesto, I figure that she has access to that knowledge)
> 
> a couple of lines were shamelessly cribbed from a [a journey](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13878933), which has a similar scene of eleanor debating showing chidi the tape, because I liked them.
> 
> for those of you playing along at home, I've now written nearly 30k of good place fic this year, and only 15k of my dissertation, and yes I hate myself for it.


End file.
